Benjamin Baker-smith
Security Team Lead at Grindr
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Baker-smith is a security-focused engineering leader with 12 years of hands-on experience across full-stack development, data platforms, SRE, and cloud security. Currently leading the Security team at Grindr after serving as Staff Cloud Security Engineer, he has a proven track record of building and securing server-side systems and data infrastructure at enterprises like American Family Insurance and high-growth firms such as Jellyvision. Comfortable bridging engineering and operational concerns, he excels at turning complex, large-scale requirements into auditable, reliable systems. Based in Chicago, he pairs a creative foundation in visual arts and cinema studies with deep technical chops, which helps him communicate security trade-offs clearly to engineering and product teams. Notably, his career path shows a deliberate shift from web and media engineering into principal-level data and cloud security leadership, demonstrating fast learning and adaptability.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
continuing education, Computer Science, continuing education, Computer Science at Roosevelt UniversityBA, Visual Arts, Cinema Studies, BA, Visual Arts, Cinema Studies at Oberlin College
English
Github Skills (124)
http10
websocket10
terraform10
pop310
command-line-tool10
sftp10
ftp10
ftps10
telnet10
ldap10
user-agent10
imap10
graph10
libcurl10
scp10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
bitsynthesis/3d-printing
Feb 2020 - Jun 2025
Contributions:16 pushes, 3 branches, 4 tags in 5 years 5 months
bitsynthesis/party-up
Jan 2018 - Feb 2024
Contributions:5 pushes, 4 branches in 6 years 2 months
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